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Former founder and Square veteran Saumil Mehta shares a framework for figuring out when to bring on the first PM. Every early-stage founder has tons of unofficial titles: developer, chief marketing officer, customer support specialist. As a startup scales, they eventually pass most of these jobs onto new hires. But there’s one that many founders have an especially hard time letting go of: IC PM. Saumil Mehta has been that founder who couldn’t step away from the sprint plans. It wasn’t until his teammates told him he was holding up engineering and design that he realized he might need to hire a PM. But that was no easy decision. “I was torn. I’d spent my whole career in product up until starting my company. I felt overprotective of every single product decision,” he says. The hiring math was stressful. Should that spend go to a PM over another engineer or account exec who could up the pace of building or selling? And this calculus has only gotten trickier in the AI era, as the PM job spec gets rewritten and PM-to-engineer ratios fluctuate. Mehta has since developed a framework for founders making this call: Hire your first PM once the marginal hour you spend on product work is worth less than the same hour you might spend on go-to-market or company building. On The Review, he shares four heuristics to sort out when it’s time to hire the first PM. There generally isn’t a clean-cut funding stage, revenue target or timeline to warrant bringing on a PM — instead, Mehta recommends evaluating these factors: - The rate (and frequency) of inputs for decision-making. In the beginning, the only signal on what to build comes from the founders. As a startup finds nascent product-market fit, inputs start to flow in from engineers, designers, current and future customers and product analytics — and it gets harder for founders to make quick roadmap calls. “Put simply, the number of inputs and time-sensitive tasks were creating demands on my time that working more hours simply couldn’t compensate for,” says Mehta.
- Customer-facing surface area. “The need to hire the first IC PM is directly correlated with the amount of customer-facing ‘surface area’ in a product,” says Mehta. “In this case, ‘surface area’ is an imperfect term to describe the unique number and the general complexity of the screens a customer could interact with.”
- The impact of AI. “While AI will surely impact where PMs spend their time, I believe that the productivity boom from AI will, on balance, result in startups hiring the first PM sooner than they would have in a pre-AI world,” he says.
- The opportunity cost of your time. One hour running weekly product analytics might be far more impactful spent pushing a design partner deal over the finish line. Mehta lays out a quick guide to do your own opportunity cost analysis on tactical product work.
Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing!
-The Review Editors
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